Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §3.3
'Crucifix' (in the 1290s) we begin to see an emotive intensity which causes the
viewer to recognize that here was a man who did indeed suffer. 23 But many find
the most striking (though by no means the first) example of brutally realistic iconography
to be the Isenheim altarpiece of Griinewald, some two hundred years
later. Here we are confronted with the historical reality of flagellated flesh and
crucifixion in all its horror and grotesqueness. No impassive deity this! It is a historical
curiosity, but worth noting nonetheless, that the Isenheim altarpiece of
Griinewald was completed and the Greek New Testament of Erasmus produced in
the same year, 1516, the year before Luther nailed his famous theses to the church
door in Wittenberg (1517) and thus, in the event, launched the Reformation.
Where Renaissance concern to criticize the present in the light of the past
made the greatest impact was in raising the question of what Jesus really intended
so far as the church was concerned. 24 Here the tension between history
(historical scholarship) and (traditional) faith began to become sharper and less
comfortable. It was not yet a contrast, not yet a confrontation. The Reformers
were reacting against what they perceived as ecclesiastical abuse, not against traditional
faith in Christ, or traditional Christology. On the contrary, it was important
for them to reaffirm the central Christian dogmas regarding Jesus. If anything,
they were more vehement against the Socinian denial of the deity of Christ
than the Catholics. 25 As the Radical Reformation gave rise to extremes which
threatened what the principal Reformers counted important, so any weakening of
the christological dogmas would have been perceived not as a reformation of
Christianity but as a threat to the very existence of Christianity itself.
The real confrontation between faith and history lay ahead.
23. J. R. Spencer, 'Cimabue', EncBr 4.616.
24. Seen particularly in the vigorous attempts by the Reformers to argue that the rock on
which Christ promised to build his church (Matt. 16.18) was not Peter himself but Peter's faith
in Christ (O. Cullmann, Peter: Disciple, Apostle, Martyr [London: SCM, 2 1962] 168).
25. See, e.g., H. L. Short, 'Unitarians and Universalists 1 , EncBr 18.859-62 (here 860);
Brown, Jesus 30-1.
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